Olympic glory or grassroots development?: Sport policy priorities in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, 1960 – 2006

This article traces and evaluates the wider historical and sociopolitical context for sport policy priorities, in general, from 1960 to 2006 in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) but with a specific focus on identifying and analysing policy developments at the elite (Olympic) levels of sport. Drawing on the advocacy coalition framework's assumptions regarding policy change it is apparent that, in Australia and Canada (in contrast to the UK), the prioritization of elite sport achievement has been at the forefront of federal government policies over the past 25 to 30 years. However, over the past four to five years, there are indications that both Australian and Canadian federal governments have begun to reassess their respective policy priorities for sport. In the UK, it is only over the past decade that central government has promoted a far more positive policy discourse around, and allocated increasingly large amounts of public money for, elite sport development. Of concern in all three countries is that the inexorable pursuit of sporting excellence on the international stage is one in which broader social goals associated with sport become routinely subordinated to the production of performance.